Buon Anno!

 

vi auguriamo uno splendido 2026 di nuovo con una copertina del New Yorker. Questa è uscita sul primo numero del 2024 della rivista ed è stata disegnata da Bianca Bagnarelli, illustratrice e fumettista italiana. 

The Uptown Local

One night in July 2013, Leadbeater, then 24, was drinking and smoking with his older brother and friends outside his parents’ house in Kearny, N.J., when he opened an email from the poet James Fenton, his mentor at the time in the MFA program at Columbia University. Earlier in the day, Fenton had sent a cryptic email about an unnamed “well-known writer” searching for an assistant, and Leadbeater had immediately expressed interest; now, Fenton revealed that Leadbeater would be interviewed by Joan Didion. “Whatever criminal gamble my father had made — desperately poor, abused horrifically, thirty years of manual labor, a few years of wire fraud — had paid off,” Leadbeater writes. “In one generation, we’d gone from the basement of the gas station next to the junkyard in New Jersey to the Upper East Side, Madison Avenue, Joan.” Kristen Martin, The Washington Post

Harlem on My Mind

In January 1969, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened an exhibition dedicated to the vibrant history of Harlem—the institution’s first attempt at displaying and interpreting African American culture. “Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968” came to life at the tail end of the civil rights movement and on the cusp of Black Power. [...]

Instead, “Harlem on My Mind” represented Harlem via floor-to-ceiling photomurals, archival ephemera, and street soundscapes alongside interpretive text. It was the cutting edge of immersive exhibition design; the Met had never put on an exhibition like it before (and hasn’t since). Yet from the perspective of many Black artists, critics, academics, and organizers, the show was woefully retrograde. Despite concerns raised by community representatives during the exhibition’s development, the Met had reduced the culture of Harlem to an object of sociological, or even ethnographic, inquiry. Black people were once again the subjects, rather than the authors of their representation. [...]

Today, the legacy of “Harlem on My Mind” lies in the organizing that its failures prompted. In response to the exhibition, artists formed the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition and picketed the show, carrying signs that read “Harlem on Whose Mind?” and “Whose Image of Whom?” The BECC, which remained active through the 1970s, would go on to demand that the Met and other art institutions hire Black curators and administrators and display work by Black artists. It would not be an overstatement to suggest that the new Met show “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism,” curated by Denise Murrell, is a descendant of this activism.  Rachel Hunter Himes, The Nation

la mostra "The Harlem Renaissance" è al Met fino al 28 giugno

Verdi’s Jewish Opera Grandly Staged at the Metropolitan

Nabucco is widely seen as a political opera. But while Verdi’s nationalist operas have mostly dropped out of the repertory of major venues, Nabucco is still performed widely, in part because it has better music, and also because it is not so much a nationalist opera as a religious one. With the arguable exception of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Nabucco is the most Jewish of operas, with a deeply sympathetic portrayal of the First Exile. David P. Goldman, Tablet

Baritone George Gagnidze makes his Met role debut as the imperious king Nabucco, alongside soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska reprising her thrilling turn as his vengeful daughter Abigaille. Mezzo-soprano Maria Barakova and tenor SeokJong Baek, in his company debut, are Fenena and Ismaele, whose love transcends politics, and bass Dmitry Belosselskiy repeats his celebrated portrayal of the high priest Zaccaria. Daniele Callegari conducts Verdi’s exhilarating early masterpiece, which features the ultimate showcase for the great Met Chorus, the moving “Va, pensiero.” Al Metropolitan fino al prossimo 26 gennaio.

Things started getting weird

Let’s start off, as most good books do, with an inciting incident. In this case, that’s the arrival of an 87,000-word manuscript, an unpublished novel, in someone’s email inbox. The title of the document is “Bad Summer People”, and the setting of the book seems familiar to the person who receives the email. Some of the character names do, too. Because of this, the document gets forwarded to someone else who may find it interesting. Who then sends it to another person. And another. Eventually, this unpublished work causes a cascade of small-town mayhem, ending up as a tabloid story with a headline that reads “Media exec’s novel about murder, sex and lies in the moneyed town of Saltaire has sent residents into a spin.”

Sounds like the plot of a good beach read, right? Well, unfortunately for the media exec in question – me – that juicy plotline happened in real life, not between the pages of a book. Emma Rosenblum, The Guardian

le avventure di un libro e una lettura per l'estate (l'ho raccomandata anche sul mio boxino per Internazionale). Anche la foto è adatta all'estate! Il giallo di Emma Rosenblum, Bad Summer People, è pubblicato da Penguin.

Capote’s Women

The biggest tragedy of Truman Capote’s altogether tragic life was that he never got to write Answered Prayers, the novel of high society shenanigans that he and the rest of the world knew would be his masterpiece.[...]

The main characters in Answered Prayers would be a group of high-society women whom Capote referred to in real life as his “swans”. They included Babe Paley, Lee Radziwill, Slim Keith and CZ Guest, as well as Gloria Guinness, Marella Agnelli and Pamela Harriman. They were immensely rich, clever if not intellectual, better with horses than children and never off the best-dressed list. They all also adored Truman Capote, the tiny, camp southern journalist who loved nothing better than a bibulous lunch at Elaine’s or La Côte Basque larded with some vicious gossip, typically concerning whichever swan had just left the table to powder her nose. Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian

nella foto: Truman Capote con Lee Radziwill nel 1966. Il libro di cui si parla è: Laurence Leamer, Capote’s Women (Hodder & Stoughton).

The Sullivanians

At its peak, in the mid- to late seventies, the psychoanalytic association known as the Sullivanian Institute had as many as six hundred patient-members clustered in apartment buildings that the group bought or rented on the cheap on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. They also ran an experimental theatre troupe, called the Fourth Wall, on the Lower East Side. The Sullivanians adhered to the same principles and traditions as many of the ashrams and rural intentional communities of the era: polyamory, communal living, group parenting, socialist politics. But they came to their belief system through the gateway of psychoanalysis, the self-actualization tool of the urbane intellectual. And they enacted their beliefs on a crowded concrete island of nearly eight million people, often while holding down high-status jobs as physicians, attorneys, computer programmers, and academics. The institute’s co-founder and reigning tyrant, Saul Newton, who sat atop the organization from the mid-nineteen-fifties until the mid-nineteen-eighties (he died in 1991), may have come closer than any of his far more notorious peers to establishing a truly metropolitan cult—its members visible but its practices obscure. Jessica Winter, The New Yorker

rensione dell'ultimo libro di Alexander Stille, The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), che sembra molto interessante!

Edward Hopper’s New York

A lot of things go missing in the paintings of Edward Hopper. Most notably, it’s people. In the first half of the 20th century, he painted New York when it was the largest city in the world, yet his streets are often empty, or haunted by only a few isolated figures. New York was then, as it is now, a diverse city, rich with racial and ethnographic diversity, but that, too, is absent in Hopper’s imagination. Philip Kennicott, WP

Edward Hopper’s New York Through March 5 at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Edward Hopper’s New York

Edward Hopper (1882–1967) was the painter of small-town America. This we know. That his small town happened to be New York City, his home for nearly sixty years, we may not know. “Edward Hopper’s New York,” now on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, tells the hometown story of an artist we thought we knew all along in a novel and illuminating way. [...] 

Hopper treated New York as his own small town. James Panero, The New Criterion

“Edward Hopper’s New York” opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, on October 19, 2022, and remains on view through March 5, 2023.

e con questa mostra che si prospetta molto interessante auguro a tutti un felice 2023! 

Italy’s Great Historical Novel

Last month, the Modern Library added to its list “The Betrothed” (“I Promessi Sposi”), from 1842, by the Italian writer Alessandro Manzoni, in a new translation—the first in fifty years—by Michael F. Moore.In some respects, this is a curious choice. Most readers outside Italy will not have heard of the title, or even of the author. In Italy, the book is considered a pillar of the national literature, perhaps second only to the Divine Comedy. Joan Acocella, The New Yorker

ottima cosa, questa nuova traduzione e questa riscoperta di Manzoni. E visto che parliamo di classici, vi propongo il primo racconto di Nora Ephron sul New Yorker, "About (Almost Surely) New York", ovviamente. Risale al novembre del 1974.

Something has happened to telephone booths in New York. No one knows when it happened, and no one knows what it is that happened, but something has happened. Telephone booths in New York are different. They have changed. There are people who say it has to do with what they look like, and there are people who say that it has to do with whether they are out of order, and there are people who say that all that is beside the point. What matters, they say, is that something has happened to telephone booths in New York. Nora Ephron, The New Yorker

 

Brooklyn o Manhattan?

In American cultural and intellectual life, New York City sets the tone. As the main hub for the country’s media and frequent originator of trends that percolate through US society, what’s “in” with the New York scene today is often central to American culture tomorrow. And politics, too ­– as US conservatives never tire of noting – is often downstream of culture.

But New York City’s intellectual landscape is increasingly split between two warring scenes, divided by geography, aesthetics and politics. Which of these prevails could affect whether America shifts right or remains where it is. Nick Burns, The New Stateman

e dieci libri sull'ascolto della natura:

From precise transliterations of birdsong to a quest for one square inch of silence, these stories teach us how to open our ears to the world. David George Haskell, The Guardian

Bernard Malamud's Mistress

Dusty Sklar intervista Arlene Heyman, psicanalista newyorkese che, negli anni '60 fu l'amante di Malamud:

Dusty Sklar: When did you attend Bernard Malamud’s class? Why did you choose his particular class?

Arlene Heyman: In 1961 I was a sophomore at Bennington College, 19 years old, when I first heard that Bernard Malamud would be coming to Vermont to teach creative writing. He had already won the National Book Award for The Magic Barrel so he was known and respected in the literary world—which was the only world that mattered to many of us. Tablet Magazine

When the Barbizon Gave Women Rooms of Their Own

On the corner of East Sixty-third Street and Lexington Avenue, in a building where the apartments sell for anywhere from one million to thirteen million dollars, there is a woman who pays around a hundred and thirteen dollars a month in rent. She lives on the fourth floor, and has maid service two days a week, a front-desk staff to take her messages, and a private bricked terrace at the end of her hall. Casey Cep, The New Yorker

Il Barbizon, che nostalgia!

Pretend It's a City

 

Is there anything more delightful than watching Martin Scorsese enjoy someone? One of the best things about his new documentary series, “Pretend It’s a City,” is getting to see the filmmaker react to his subject, the author and humorist Fran Lebowitz, who is also his good friend. Ten years ago, Scorsese made “Public Speaking,” his first documentary about Lebowitz, which was an ode to a vanishing breed of New York celebrity, as well as a portrait of the city itself. Sitting in a booth at the Waverly Inn, Lebowitz expounded on her various hobbyhorses, including her rejection of technology, her love of talking, and her addiction to smoking. (“The clerk said, ‘Oh, you know, Marlboro Lights, they’re on sale.’ And I thought, Really? Why? . . . They could be a million dollars, I don’t care.”) Now Scorsese and Lebowitz have made a kind of sequel, which comes, in the manner of the hour, as a streaming Netflix series rather than a feature-length film. Naomi Fry, The New Yorker

The Strand

The Strand, uno dei luoghi cult di Manhattan, ha subito un rinnovamento e non è più quello di una volta. "Concerned with the persistent competition from online booksellers and chain stores, the Strand recently hired a design company to advise them as to “what customers want now and in the future,” Eddie Sutton, the store’s manager, who has been there since 1991, said. What many customers want turns out to be the convenience and variety found online. And so the Strand traded the bag check for video cameras and plainclothes security. The book-buying counter was moved from the front to the back of the store. The leather-bound sets (Will and Ariel Durant, the complete works of Dickens, Toynbee) behind the cashier were pushed aside to fit books arranged by the color of their spines. The non-book section was expanded to sell socks, lollipops, and greeting cards alongside T-shirts, refrigerator magnets, and totes bearing slogans like “Prose Before Hoes.” You can now mail letters from inside the store. Rachel Shteir, newyorker.

Lost NY

Today in New York there are more than 1,300 individual landmarks, and 114 historic districts encompassing some 33,000 landmarked properties. 

Other landmarked sites include about a hundred lampposts, seven cast-iron sidewalk clocks, three Coney Island amusement park rides, and a Magnolia grandiflora tree planted in Brooklyn in 1885.

Yet prior to the landmarks law there was no legal means for protecting historic sites like the Roxy. Many had fallen into disrepair. Alex Straub, nybooks.

Il Whitney Museum di Renzo Piano

Il Whitney Museum di Renzo Piano non piace a James Panero. 
"The new Whitney Museum, designed by Renzo Piano and Renzo Piano Building Workshop, along with Cooper Robertson, at a cost of $422 million, opened to much fanfare on May 1. From the outside, it is a jumble of pipes, stairs, HVAC units, portholes, bending planes of enameled steel, and what look like a few stone corners hauled off as spoils from the old Whitney building, that crystalline fortress of solitude on Madison Avenue designed by Marcel Breuer in 1966, which the new Whitney now metaphorically explodes, reprocesses, and repackages. Beyond the mere display of art, this new cultural factory serves double duty as an incinerator of the museum’s own unwanted past. And unlike the waste-transfer facility next door, with its idling trucks and utilitarian sheds parked along the water, which will soon be renewed as parkland, the Whitney’s new exterior is not a holdover of industrial blight but the aggressive, purpose-built pastiche of blight. newcriterion.

SAHMs

WHEN our family moved from the West Village to the Upper East Side in 2004, seeking proximity to Central Park, my in-laws and a good public school, I thought it unlikely that the neighborhood would hold any big surprises. For many years I had immersed myself — through interviews, reviews of the anthropological literature and participant-observation — in the lives of women from the Amazon basin to sororities at a Big Ten school. I thought I knew from foreign.

Then I met the women I came to call the Glam SAHMs, for glamorous stay-at-home-moms, of my new habitat. My culture shock was immediate and comprehensive. In a country where women now outpace men in college completion, continue to increase their participation in the labor force and make gains toward equal pay, it was a shock to discover that the most elite stratum of all is a glittering, moneyed backwater. Wednesday Martin, nyt.

Oliver Sacks My Own Life

"A MONTH ago, I felt that I was in good health, even robust health. At 81, I still swim a mile a day. But my luck has run out — a few weeks ago I learned that I have multiple metastases in the liver. ...

It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can. In this I am encouraged by the words of one of my favorite philosophers, David Hume, who, upon learning that he was mortally ill at age 65, wrote a short autobiography in a single day in April of 1776. He titled it “My Own Life.”

“I now reckon upon a speedy dissolution,” he wrote. “I have suffered very little pain from my disorder; and what is more strange, have, notwithstanding the great decline of my person, never suffered a moment’s abatement of my spirits. I possess the same ardour as ever in study, and the same gaiety in company.” nyt.

Un appartamento a NY

Ho scelto questo post per la foto. E per l'argomento: gli appartamenti di Manhattan. "And yet apartments nevertheless share certain qualities with stage sets—each room, even a bathroom, is a scenario into which people exit and enter. The sense of performance and audience—and, by extension, voyeurism—is built into the landscape. To glance at the façade of an apartment building, especially at night, when the windows are a crossword puzzle of light and dark boxes, is to be reminded that there may be someone looking back at you. This tension—between the apartment as a redoubt and source of privacy and as a place of performance, where privacy is relentlessly invaded—is further amplified by the fact that apartment buildings are filled with spaces that are public and yet, in some ways, especially private, because you never expect to see someone there: places like the laundry room, the storage room, the roof, or the backstairs". Thomas Beller, newyorker.